“Luke!” she yells, leaning out into the rain, eyes wide down the sidewalk in one direction, then the other.
A passing pack of bar-hoppers gawks at her. University kids. “Fuckin’ trash!” one of the guys bellows, hidden among the chuckling others. A girl turns, looks in wonder.
Carly sprints back up the stairs for her boots and her keys. But when she is out front again, she has no idea which way to go.
—
His wobbly left-handed block letters sketch the name, the number on a ripped envelope on the kitchen table. An area code she doesn’t recognize. She dials.
“Hello?” The voice groggy, muffled.
“Is this Troy? I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”
“Is this Carly?” He tells her to hold on. Whispers to someone. The rustle of sheets or clothes, the click of a door. “Carly? I’m so happy you called.”
His voice is shaking. He is in Salt Lake City. He is younger than her. Married. In sales. A baby girl. He apologizes for being so nervous. “Dad talked about you at the end. He wasn’t too with it then, I didn’t even think you were real.”
“Dad.”
“Dad, yeah. I’m sorry—this must be so weird.”
He exhales to let it settle. She stands in the middle of her living room. Rain against the window.
“He said you were a dancer? Said he used to watch you. Figured you were pro now, or must be pro now. It took me a while to track you down.”
The fridge whirs to life. Her own breath in the earpiece. He swallows into her quiet.
“Sorry,” he says. “Wow. This is harder than I thought it’d be.”
“Has he been there? In Salt Lake? I mean, is that where you were born?”
“Born and raised, yeah. He and my mom, they met here.”
“So he’s been there, in Salt Lake City, this whole time?”
Troy sounds like he’s holding his breath. He lets it out. “For the most part, yeah.”
She listens to the rain with eyes closed. She could be anyone, anywhere. She tries to pretend she is someone, somewhere else to trick the riot raging to life inside her. To hold it back.
He clears his throat. “They—well, Mom now, she lives not too far from here. She thinks you should come.”
Carly lets out a sound, a beat of a laugh. “Did he know that mine died?”
He says nothing for a moment. “I’m so sorry to hear.”
Rain getting harder now. She opens her eyes to watch it blur the window. Blood pounding in her ears like a fetal ultrasound.
“Listen,” he says. “This is obviously a lot for you. Why don’t we try—”
“When. When did he watch me? You said he watched me dance.”
He swallows again. “I don’t know. Nothing was too clear by then. But listen, I want to say that I think he was sorry. I think that’s what he meant, when he was talking about you.”
She makes the sound again, the rest of the laugh escaping.
“This isn’t easy for me either,” he says. “To not know about you, to go my whole life.”
Her breath feels like black smoke when she exhales. It fills the room. The rain beating against the window, she can hear through to its rhythm now.
“Does that matter?” he says.
She’s listening hard. There’s always a rhythm. It isn’t easy for everyone to hear, but Carly can always hear the rhythm. Her riot stomping, clanging in time. Her head bobs, catching the beat.
POSTCARDS
JANUARY 5
I know, it’s been a while. Eight months? Nine? Longer, I guess. Africa this time. Ghana. Not yet sure when I’m coming back home.
I had this memory yesterday, one of those flashbulbs. It came to me when I was sitting on a bus stuck in a crowded market. Heat pressing in, an angry voice bleating over the radio. People everywhere around us. Women with babies on their backs and loads on their heads, oranges, papayas, bananas, cassava. Men pushing carts, pulling wagons, piling tilapia onto tables. Drivers yelling out of duct-taped taxi windows and leaning on their horns. I exhaled hard out of my nose against the stench of sweating bodies and decomposing fish, and motioned out my window to a young girl with a bowl of water sachets on her head. She turned only her eyes to me as she shuffled over so the bowl would stay level, and had to step quickly to keep up when the bus started to move. I reached out to trade her a coin for some water and then it all just fell away—the girl, the market, the hot vinyl seat under my thighs—and I was on the beach in Cape Cod.
My father is setting up the camera on a tripod. He’s swearing at it, first because he can’t get it to lock into place, and then because he can’t remember how to set the timer so we’re all in the shot at once. It’s November, the only month he can get time off work, and curse words from the blend of languages he’s picked up at the factory mix with his terse Ukrainian.
Cape Cod, of all places. Such misfits here. My mother loved the Kennedys, Jackie in particular, and that’s why we’ve come; a wood-panelled motel room tight with extra cots is to be our version of the Kennedy Compound for five days. I’d been sullen and silent for most of the ten-hour drive along the darkening highway, furious they’d stolen me from my friends, angrier still at my mother’s delusions.
Our first family walk through Provincetown: wide-eyed caution as we head toward the sea. Quaint and colourless like other seaside towns when the months bend to winter, it only winks here and there at the life that fills its streets in August—washed-out blue cottages boarded up for the season, a tattered rainbow flag limp above the drugstore, faded All Night Party posters lacquered to a brick wall, a leather outlet with mannequins still armed with whips in the windows.
I know Mother has realized this isn’t the Hyannis Port of her black-and-white Life magazine dreams, but she acts like it doesn’t matter as she consults the brochure she’s taken from the motel and points to the sites as we pass:
“There’s the Lobster Pot.”
“Here’s the library with the sailboat on the second floor…should be open tomorrow.”
“Oh! Here’s a passageway that leads to the ocean.”
My father’s steel-grey eyes take in the rest as he marches along beside her, tripod gripped in his immense right hand that is warped and hardened from decades of twisting wrenches, the fraying camera strap slung over his rigid shoulder.
He isn’t an easy tourist. His walk is stiff, his eyes suspicious as he presses his palm into my mother’s back, directing her past two men smoking by the drugstore who are cackling like aged beauty queens. For once, he doesn’t shout at my young brother and sister for shrieking and dallying behind us. I take Sasha and Ava by the hand and follow my parents through the walkway to the beach.
“We should take a picture here while the tide is out,” Mother calls over the waves. She points to the rotting pier behind her. We arrange ourselves, shivering against the wind—her hands on Sasha’s shoulders, his eyes on the ground, Ava’s face stretched into a clenched-jaw grimace (the only way she, at five, responds to cameras), my gangly arms crossed over my chest—as my father fiddles with the camera and tripod a short distance away. His curses mingle with the wind, waves and the whistle of blowing grass. Finally, he walks over, still grumbling, and stands like a soldier by my mother.
Flash.
Then another,
and another.
—
And I was back in the bus on the torn vinyl seat, bouncing along a broken road, smelling tilapia grilled whole on the street. My fellow passengers looked out the windows or fanned themselves, their calm and patience discordant with the outrage of the man on the crackling radio. My chance at water was gone but it didn’t matter much because I was almost home.
Home.
The last two pictures used to make my mother and me laugh. In one, we’re all heading in opposite directions as my father strides toward the camera, loosened. The other is a close-up of him, blurry, nearly right up his nostrils. I don’t remember that one as much because he tore it up when he saw it.
He probably would have torn up the other, but Mother hid it behind her when we first got them back from Black’s, and kept it in her drawer buried beneath her rolled-up socks and folded nylons.
The first photograph, the one he meant to take, where he stands erect and unsmiling just apart from the rest of us—Mother framed it and put it on the table with the porcelain lamp in our living room. It’s the one they put in the paper.
JANUARY 16
I need to tell you that I’ve forgotten winter. It hasn’t been that long, but the heat here is so thick and unrelenting, I’m barely out of the tub before I’m dripping again. Sweat rolls down my body, one drop in a race with the next, while I wait on the road for a taxi. My clothes are always wet.
I remember this Blake poem about winter that I had to read in high school. Not the verses so much, but how it made me feel. The ice and snow and groaning rocks, the bleakness, the cruelty of the season. Stark open space and raw winds that scrape against your skin. I could see the tiny silhouette of a man in the empty blowing white, wondered where he could be going.
Last night I drank wine on a friend’s balcony overlooking rusted tin roofs and the river his poorest neighbours squat in to shit. You wouldn’t believe the roar of the rain when it pelts against those rooftops; the thunder, when it comes, is no match for that steady, deafening drum. The wine we drank was cheap and sweet, and the bottle perspired in the heat of the evening. He said something about not missing winters at home in Germany (or Austria?) and it made me think of that poem. And then of Sasha.
Sasha in his sled. He is young, maybe two. I pull him behind me in our snowy yard at night, our shadows long in the light slanting from the bedroom windows. I race along the fence with the sled’s handle in my grip, kicking up snow and taking care to avoid the corner where my father’s tomatoes will grow in the spring. Sasha throws his head back and laughs puffs of warm breath into the cold, clapping his woollen mittens together soundlessly. As soundless, almost, as the snowflakes drifting,
drifting,
to rest all around.
Blake conjures this now. Sasha laughing in the face of a soulless winter, gripping the sides of the sled with his too-big mittens.
The German was asking if I wanted a cigarette. I told him there were things I missed about winter. He said we weren’t talking about that anymore.
JANUARY 30
In the market today I bought avocados and pineapple from the thin woman in the shapeless green dress. Every week now I’m there, buying fruit from her stand. She’s not sure if I’m here to stay or if I’ll disappear when the thrill wears off, like all the others who bought a ticket for this ride. At least, that’s how I interpret her indifference. She counts my money without stopping her conversation with the other women who sit on the bench and look out at the road, tsk-ing and shaking their heads.
This morning, for the first time, she looked me in the eye when she told me how much I owed her, and as I pulled the bills from my pocket, trying to think of something to say in return, I felt this hand on my arm. A woman’s hand, a mother’s hand. I knew without even turning to look. My bra strap must have slipped down my arm because she was tucking it back under my sleeve, squeezing my shoulder as if to keep it in place. I swivelled around expecting to see a warm maternal smile, but instead she was stern, her face etched out of rock, cold brown eyes circled with blue. She was different from the other women in the market with her black leather purse and navy suit and blouse. A government worker maybe, or a lawyer. She held the hand of a little girl in a school uniform and backpack who watched me with the same hard stare while her mother led her away.
—
My mother looks at me from the other end of the front hall. She’s by the door, the covered basket of eggs and braided bread beside her, ready to be blessed by the priest. She steps into her brown leather church shoes and turns to the mirror to tie a scarf around her head. I always told her that the scarf made her look old, but it really made her look like a starlet from the sixties, ready for a jaunt in a convertible.
Photos never did capture her as I saw her. At the mirror, knotting the scarf under her chin, running Revlon Red lipstick over her mouth. Any moment now she’ll call to Sasha and Ava demanding they be at the door in an instant. Worn down by months of resistance, she no longer forces me to go, and is silent as my siblings race each other toward her. She hooks her arm under the basket handle and follows them out to the car, sending a ripple of guilt to my core.
—
I had to ask the woman at the fruit stand to repeat how much I owed her, which made her kiss her teeth before saying again forty thousand. She nodded at me as she took the bills and met my eyes once more before I turned to leave.
People here go to church for four hours on Sunday mornings. Four hours. The preachers shout and sing through blown speakers, women fan themselves with cardboard and dance in the aisles with tambourines. Everyone goes. I was thinking I might, one Sunday. I don’t know. It just seems like a long time to be stuck with God.
FEBRUARY 12
I met this girl Karen from England. She works with the UN at the refugee camp an hour from the city where we live. It’s not like the ones you see in the news—there aren’t flapping tents or emaciated children lying immobile on makeshift cots. This one was a hospital complex long before the first Liberian civil war. It’s now a place where thousands of Liberians live, some for more than fifteen years, some for their whole young lives. There are stores, schools, a newspaper, community meetings. Men gather around radios listening to the BBC World Service, arcing and adjusting the antennas to get reception, and launching into heated political debates. Boys play soccer between the sky-blue huts that are stencilled with black numbers.
I’ve gone with Karen a few times now and have become friends with one of the writers for the camp newspaper. Leonard is his name. He’s lived there for almost ten years and used to be a radio host in Monrovia. Music and politics, he told me, as if they always went together.
He sings a cappella with a group formed at the camp and today he played me a tape of their songs. No instruments, he said, we came here with only our voices, so that is how we do. He rewound the tape at one point, listened closely, and said they had to work on their harmony in that number. I asked if he lived here with his family. We were sitting outside, on the steps of a small medical building overlooking a sun-baked field. Teenaged boys were playing soccer, torn rags of blue or red tied to their arms to indicate which team they were on. Leonard watched, his eyes darting to keep up with the rapid shifts in the game.
Two sisters, he said. But there had been nine of them, nine siblings. Four sisters, four brothers, plus his mother and father. He might still have brothers in Liberia. Two of them were shot with his father, his mother and two sisters raped and stabbed in the back room.
It is hard to say, he said. Hard to say.
—
I see them all in their final movements. Mom stirs soup in her striped yellow apron. Ava and Sasha, cross-legged, play Super Mario Bros. in the basement on the worn shag carpet. Sasha’s nails bitten down to nothing, Ava’s painted sparkly purple from when I’d visited the weekend before. My father loads his rifle in the cement work room beside where they play. Or maybe it’s loaded already—of that, I’m never clear.
He doesn’t need it for them anyway, not for the little ones, his huge hands enough for their thin necks. My mother must have heard something because she’s at the doorway when he comes upstairs and he gets her in the chest and the forehead, the wooden spoon still in her hand when she slumps to the ground. Then, in the quiet, he makes it to his brown plaid chair where the barrel clinks against his teeth.
—
We sat and listened to Leonard’s music and watched the match until I had to go home.
FEBRUARY 27
Buses idle in front of the camp in plumes of diesel smoke, waiting to take refugees back to Liberia. Voluntary repatriation. Families queue in the black haze with large plaid shopping bags packed with t
he things they’ve amassed since living here. The men yell and chase away European and North American ex-pats who pretend they’re not there to take artistic pictures.
I talked to Leonard today about going home. He said he wanted to, but didn’t know when and didn’t know what it would be when he got there. He asked when I was going home. I pretended I didn’t hear the question.
—
Sometimes Ava’s the clearest. I wish she wasn’t. Eyes like my mother, white-blond hair soft like dove feathers. She runs to me where I wait by the fence after school to pick her up. She doesn’t know I’ve been there long enough to see her stand up to the bossy girls. Fearless in that schoolyard. On our way home, she walks with her hand in mine and I tell her that I think she’s brave.
Brave like you? she asks.
That afternoon she swings around the uneven bars in gymnastics class as though her body has no weight and the ground beneath is made of Jell-O, while I watch from a bench at the side.
—
I don’t so much anymore, but I used to wonder if he thought of me when he did it. If he had an image of me at my desk, while he slipped the bullets into his rifle, sitting in my dorm room, staring at the bookshelf. Molecular Biology, Fourth Edition, Complex Analysis, Principles of Physical Chemistry. If he could picture how my pen rolled onto the floor and down the vent as he walked up behind Sasha and Ava, how the metal lamp singed my arm when I lunged for it. How I searched in vain through my drawers for another pen as he went up the stairs to the kitchen, to my mother, how I laid my head down on my notebook for a rest as she collapsed to the floor. How I woke with a start, with a stiff neck and dents on my cheek when my roommate burst in with her boyfriend.
Well, by then it didn’t matter.
I see him, though.
He storms out of the house, looking for his wrench, and finds it in my six-year-old hands trying to take the training wheels off my bike. He snatches it away and crouches down beside me on the driveway to remove the bolts with slow, enormous hands. He doesn’t tell me to go away but carries on, pretending he isn’t showing me how to do it. His hands were big, but never slow. Not like that.
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